Project GENIE (Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange), an initiative by the American Association for Cancer Research, is launching a five-year, $36 million research collaboration with nine biopharmaceutical companies to obtain clinical and genomic data from an estimated 50,000 de-identified patients.
The patients are treated at institutions participating in AACR Project GENIE. The additional clinical data furthers the project goals of advancing precision oncology and powering clinical decision making through open and transparent data sharing.
The nine biopharmaceutical companies participating in the collaborative project are:
Amgen Inc.
AstraZeneca
Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Boehringer Ingelheim
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Genentech, member of the Roche Group
Janssen Research & Development, LLC
Merck
Novartis
AACR Project GENIE is a publicly accessible international cancer registry of real-world data assembled through data sharing between 19 cancer centers across the world. Through the efforts of strategic partners Sage Bionetworks and cBioPortal, the registry aggregates, harmonizes, and links clinical-grade, next-generation cancer genomic sequencing data with clinical outcomes obtained during routine medical practice from cancer patients treated at these institutions.
Currently, AACR Project GENIE’s registry contains clinical-grade cancer genomic sequencing data from nearly 71,000 patients. These data are linked to a limited set of clinical data, such as age, sex, primary diagnosis, and type of tumor sample analyzed (primary or metastatic).
The new collaboration will greatly expand the scope and accelerate the speed of clinical data collection.
In the first two years, the project will add prior cancer treatments, tumor pathology and clinical outcomes to the clinical data already linked with the genomic profiles of nearly 8,000 bladder, breast, colorectal, lung, pancreatic and prostate cancer patients treated at three of the institutions participating in AACR Project GENIE: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.
In years three through five, this data collection will be expanded to as many cancer types as possible from all active participating institutions.
“Recognizing the importance of the outputs of this project to the broader research and patient communities, and in alignment with the guiding principles of openness, transparency, and inclusion, all data generated will be made publicly available 12 months following data lock,” Shawn M. Sweeney, director of the AACR Project GENIE Coordinating Center, said in a statement.
